It's easy to get the feeling that we live in a land of calumny piled on baloney, a land where conservative newspapers masquerade as liberal press. Who but the New York Times would assign a foreign conservative hack to review a new liberal anti-capitalism book by Tony Judt? (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press). The reviewer, Josef Joffe, is a former publisher-editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit. (Joffe's review appears in the New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2010.)
Tony Judt's thesis is leftist-classic: Capitalism needs to be highly regulated in order to prevent the breeding and fomenting of greed and sociopathy.
Josef Joffe's counterargument is rightist-classic: Collectivism is evil because it leads to bureaucratic excess.
The problem is that Joffe ignores the most important difference between collectivism and capitalism: the focus of one is social justice, the focus of the other is the acquisition of private wealth. One can argue from now until doomsday which is "better" or more practical (practical for what?), but the difference in attitude about social justice remains the defining dichotomy.
In America, capitalism is hawked by so-called political conservatives, an ill-defined group ranging from a lunatic fringe to "think-tank" intellectuals over-burdened with vague college-student memories of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. But the attitudes of the group toward social justice are never vague: they like to avoid the subject.
Conservative young people do not travel by bus to the American South to work in the civil rights movement and get murdered by racists.
Conservative old people do not vote to possibly reduce their health insurance benefits in order to assist people who have no health insurance at all.
A list of conservative anti-social-justice actions and inactions is easy to construct. Conservatism is not about social justice and is usually explicitly against social justice.
Beyond ignoring the most important difference between collectivism and capitalism, Joffe parades a series of fatuous Joffeisms. Herewith a sample:
1) Joffe says "cries of the heart" like Judt's have been common since Jeremiah and the lesser prophets.
Joffe makes a big deal of this: "Where have we heard this before?" He seems to think the fact that cries of the heart are repeated throughout history demotes their significance, a rather stupid conclusion. Yes, cries of the heart occurred in the Old Testament--and they also occurred in the Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages, in the slave trade, and in Auschwitz, again and again. Does that lessen their significance? Maybe for Joffe and his think-tank colleagues it does: "Oh, we've heard all that before," they say.
2) Joffe says Judt offers a very old idea: the "virtue of collective action for the collective good."
Well, yes. But does the fact that it's an "old idea" lessen its import? Joffe thinks so.
3) Joffe says: "Judt has to shoot a goodly number of straw men. Not even manic market radicals believe, as Judt avers, that private interest will produce enough public goods -- like public education or an interstate highway system. Who in the United States (except on the fringes of thought) insists that "any one person could be completely 'self-made'?" Certainly not Europe's favorite Beelzebub, George W. Bush, who pushed No Child Left Behind and a prescription drug program for the elderly. What is the land-grant university of the 19th century, what is Head Start, what is federal tuition assistance, what is affirmative action, if not testimony to the belief that the state must level the playing field?"
But what's more important -- and ignored by Joffe -- is that American conservatives fight against nearly every piece of progressive legislation, the consequence manic market radicalism. To read the paragraph above, you might think that American conservatives supported Pell grants and Head Start and affirmative action -- a joke worthy of Goebbels.
4) Joffe says: "The market is the best information system known to man: it has millions broadcasting in real time what is offered and what is wanted at what price. This is why capitalism learns from its crises."
This is fatuous baloney. As an information system, the market is thoroughly corrupted by misinformation, withholding of information, and by gaming of the system by individuals and institutions. The ideal clean free market has never been attained anywhere on a national scale. Treating the market with religious reverence derives from sophomoric illusions about economics and history.
5) Joffe says: "Sometimes, as in 2008, markets are not self-correcting, which is why government must step in. But let's hope it will pull out again; officials are not wiser or nobler because they come with a government title."
Well, yes. And free-marketers are also not "wiser or nobler" because they've been lucky in the Wall Street casino--or because they've learned how to game the system in a sociopathic delirium.
The left has always had too much ideology. And so has the right -- and the screed by Joffe is a good example of Rightist ideological propaganda. Reading Joffe, one sniffs the absurd idea that the free market is "manly."
The struggle for social justice requires tremendous courage. The idea that human misery should be considered as merely collateral damage in the hunt for capital assets is an idea suited to sociopaths but not at all suited to the human species.
The choice of Josef Joffe to review the new book by Tony Judt was an unfortunate and silly choice by the New York Times. It may get the New York Times some attention, but it acts against the good of the public. Next time choose a centrist to review a book on the left or right.
Jason Pinter: Books Uncovered -- 5 New Releases You Should Check Out
I'm hoping to shed some light on a few books that are intriguing due to author, subject matter, publication details, or something that seems a little different, interesting, possibly out of the ordinary.
"Communism is the term for a classless society in which the productive apparatus handed to us by capitalism is harnessed, and what is produced, for whom, and under what technical basis is decided up by society, not just that 1% of society that owns everything, as under capitalism."
Imagine a society where our iconic proletarian "Joe the Plumber" and his brethren decide "what is produced, for whom, and under what technical basis." Lordy.
Just one question, if I may ... . I would suppose that if the difference between the 'Popular' and the 'Academic', as you call it, is the (absence of) knowledge of certain theories, then that doesn't necessarily imply different political agendas. What makes you think it does?
I'm sorry, but for me this is far too "ideological".
To claim that two IDEAS are conceptually distinct (as I did) doesn't mean that in reality they're never intertwined. It simply means that you have to learn to define each of them in a clear and distinct way if you want to know what you're talking about. If you don't, you'll probably have a less well articulated view of reality, which means that you'll have less power to change it.
To decide who has the right to vote for example is a political decision, NOT an economic decision. But of course, people can decide that the economic 'status' of a person has to determine the right to vote or not (as in the past only those who owned land were given the right to vote, for example). That still doesn't mean that suddenly the everything that is economic is at the same time political and vice versa.
So, once again, I think that you want to go too fast. You already put me into one of the two categories you accept to think with ("liberals" versus "radicals") without really understanding what I was saying (adding that "liberals" are siding with the ruling class, moreover...). Imo things are more complicated, AND more interesting, than some ideologists might imagine.
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A concept that Capitalists like to put forward tirelessly is the free market and its superiority. This free market, it turns out, is an ellusive concept that is deliberately kept vague as it falls apart on further inspection under any serious definition of the word 'free'. One also cannot help to notice that Capitalism doesn't need a 'free market' at all. What Capitalists really mean by free market, is a world that they are free to roam, abuse and exploit for profits without anyone being able to hold them accountable much less to stop them.
Capitalism doesn't learn from crises, it needs them to be able to survive and provokes them to be able to break down the old and replace it with something new that will create more profits for the Capitalists. This is one of the hallmarks of Capitalism, according to Karl Marx, who wrote in the Communist Manifest: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."
It is thus only logical that to a Capitalist 'old' must be equal to be something bad and despicable that needs to be destroyed to make room for something new and more profitable.
Well put. Considerably more insightful than Karl's ravings you quoted. "[R]evolutionising the instruments of production" is what most people call progress. Should we still be building cars (or computers, etc) one by one by hand or on an assembly line thereby making them cheap enough for all (including the workers) to buy?
II was relieved to see this article. I am not arguing that the NY Times had an obligation to find a reviewer who shares Judt's politics, but Joffe's piece was a snide hatchet job on an accomplished historian who is nearing the end of his life. The NY Times could have done better.
Capitalism is about wealth creation, not acquisition. Mercantilism is about acquisition - always has been. Think empire and monopoly; think social engineering and modern China.
Socialism and its apologists have always been confused about their aims because they have never acknowledged their true opposition. Socialism has always been a reaction to the excesses of industrialized mercantilism, not capitalism. Socialism needs the wealth creation capacity of free market capitalism in order to realize its vision of social justice.
However socialism as practiced today in the US is about numbers, not justice. Its practitioners obsess over ratios of greater and lesser haves and have-nots as measured by their respective shares of private wealth. They concern themselves with redistributing wealth, which is paradoxically dependent upon wealth creation - not its acquisition - best managed by private individuals. Given that such redistribution is inherently biased and socially divisive, socialism is not about social justice at all. It is about gaining control; i.e. "regulating". If it were about social justice, then Chicago and New Mexico would be socialist exemplars of success and justice, since they have largely been managed by politicians sympathetic to socialist "justice" for decades. They are, instead, exemplars of how being misguided by one's ideology will lead to perennial dysfunction and de facto servitude.
1observer
The engine of the economy is the middle class. "Defacto servitude" to a corporate master is leading to perennial dysfunction and ultimately a system where there are only the peons and the ruling class a step backwards we cannot accept. Ideological rigidity, anti-intellectualism, and religious zealotry will play itself out. If you don't see it as such it is because of the narrowness of your own view.
No, the engine of the economy is small business.
"Ideological rigidity, anti-intellectualism, and religious zealotry will play itself out."
All three appear to be on the rise, both here and in the Muslim world.
People vote with their dollars. If a good or service does not meet a human need or desire, the firm which provides it goes out of business. This system works well for the production of consumer goods. Not so well for things like health care.
Imo, and with all due respect, you're making the same mistake as some Teabaggers do: you suppose that one economic regime automatically implies a certain political regime and vice versa.
But history has shown that that's not the case. China for example is a dictatorship, not a democracy at all, but its economy is becoming more and more capitalist.
And the USSR is a perfect example of a communist economic regime combined with one of the worst totalitarian political regimes the world has ever known.
Teabaggers think that when president Obama is redistributing the wealth or regulating the insurance industry, he's not just changing an economic regime (or some economic laws), but he's at the same time moving the country from a political democracy to a political dictatorship (that's why they compare him to Hitler and fascists etc., not knowing that fascists historically tend to have communists as their eternal enemy (and killed a lot of them)).
"argumentative incompetence"....I'd say look in the mirror.
Which you right wingers do tend to get backwards.